11.25 The Day He Chose His Own Fate, Koji Wakamatsu |
Wakamatsu kept on throwing stones to the end: in 2012 alone, he came out with three movies, which screened back to back at the Busan Film Festival where he was presented with the Asian Filmmaker of the Year award. Some two weeks later, he was dead, hit by a Tokyo cab while reportedly on his way home from a meeting about his latest project, an exposé of the nuclear industry in Japan.
A lifelong provocateur, Wakamatsu fought his battles from a strategic position away from the tides of cinematic fashion, somewhere between exploitation and the avant-garde. For many years his international cult reputation came from his notoriety as a maker of ‘pink’ films—low-budget items blending softcore sado-masochism and political subversion, such as Ecstasy of the Angels (1972) and Go Go Second Time Virgin (1969). In 2006 he returned to prominence with United Red Army, an epic, gruelling docudrama chronicling the self-destruction of an early 70s leftist group: a long-cherished project for Wakamatsu, and a summary of his complex relationship with the Japanese New Left.
The clash between ‘cool’ style and ‘hot’ subject-matter in Wakamatsu’s films creates an economical, unfussy beauty; the flat, desaturated digital look of his last films is as nonchalant and functional as was his use of high-contrast black-and-white film stock in the 1960s. Monomaniacal characters and flimsy storylines are typical of porn cinema, for obvious reasons—but Wakamatsu capitalises on the absurdity, with long periods of dead time broken up by offhand acts of cruelty, rape and murder. His brand of ‘poetic purity’ closely accords with Manny Farber's description of Sam Fuller's approach: “a merging of unlimited sadism, done candidly and in close-up, with stretches of pastoral nostalgia in which there are flickers of myth.” In other respects he's like a sleazy cousin of the French New Wave: the brilliantly minimal Serial Rapist (1978) has an affinity with Godard or even Bresson in its impassive performances, refusal of psychology and loopy gags (wandering by the river, the anti-hero comes across a woman painting a picture of a smokestack, screams “That isn't beautiful!” and shoots her dead).
11.25 The Day He Chose His Own Fate, Koji Wakamatsu |
As with other very prolific directors—from Godard to Ruiz to Miike—Wakamatsu’s films often seem generated by the quasi-mechanical application of rules of thumb, which remain flexible enough to allow for any kind of casual inspiration. If none of the films screened at Busan quite rank with his best, taken as a group they give a sense of his range. 11.25 The Day Mishima Chose His Own Fate is an unorthodox biopic of the famous writer (played as a fragile dandy by Arata Iura) and a companion piece to United Red Army: the right-wing Mishima founded his own private militia in the 1960s to combat the radicals he saw as the chief threat to Japan. The link between his political philosophy and his troubled sexuality is treated obliquely, but the film makes plain that he, too, fiercely “criticised himself” for failing to live up to his own heroic conception of manhood.
The Millennial Rapture, Koji Wakamatsu |
Petrel Hotel Blue, Koji Wakamatsu |
Busan Festival, Korea, Oct 3-12, 2012, http://www.biff.kr
Jake Wilson attended the Busan International Film Festival as a member of the FIPRESCI jury.
This article first appeared as part of RealTime's online e-dition Feb 6, 2013
RealTime issue #113 Feb-March 2013 pg. 19
© Jake Wilson; for permission to reproduce apply to [email protected]